Hollow Out the Dark: A Novel

A riotous collage of criminals sets the stage in James Wade’s fourth novel, Hollow Out the Dark. A territorial war beginning in the dead of winter draws career bootleggers, lawless lawmen, and unwitting noble characters who might be used as pawns in its multidimensional web. These are strangely likable characters, each with a finely drawn agenda culled from the time and place that is prohibition era, 1932’s, salt-of-the earth East Texas.  

The story opens with an ambush on a backwoods road, as two men haul crates of homegrown whisky at the behest of their diabolical, regionally feared employers, the Fenley brothers, who run a gambling and bootlegging empire, and to whom many of the locals are beholden. Unbeknownst to the brothers, who are aptly named Frog and Squirrel Fenley, their livelihood is now challenged, and things are about to get rough.  

Amon Atkins is a Texas Ranger. He has a “nobility about him that was sculpted from his discipline not his lineage” and wants to get out from beneath his rough-edged father’s shadow in law enforcement. With a recent mar on his reputation, Amon questions his new assignment to leave Tyler, Texas, for the small town of Enoch, a ramshackle place whose only claim to fame is a recently closed paper mill. Amon’s mission is to collaborate with local law enforcement in finding evidence of murder to pin on the Fenley brothers. He is reluctant and has no choice but to uproot his family and go.  

Jesse Cole is a highly regarded veteran of the Great War, with the Distinguished Service, Victory, Purple Heart, and Congressional Medal of Honor to prove it. Now haunted and jaded, he wants to do right by his deceased elder brother, and is now ten years into caring for his brother’s wife and daughter, and in a passionless marriage. He’s a luckless hero, who has yet to discover the true facts behind his brother’s death. 

Zev Blakewell is the Fenley brothers’ nemesis. He wears a mask and is a fixer. A sinister character shrouded in mystery, each time he appears in the story, something bad happens, be it a fire or a murder. His presence is pivotal throughout the riveting story as the reader tries to figure out for whom this eerie fellow works.  

Hollis Wentworth is one step shy of being a card-carrying nitwit. A needy, nervous man with wartime ties to Jesse, it is he who puts much of the story in motion, and who ultimately proves to be Jesse Cole’s tragic foil by pulling him into the Fenley brother’s operation out of a band of brothers’ sense of duty, which sees Jesse in over his head, and colliding with Amon Atkins.  

The setting of Hollow Out the Dark is appropriately fitting for this disquieting story, and Wade broadly paints a bleak picture: It is “Wintertide. Cold and Wet. Boreal winds, and then the storm. Thunderclouds what covered the county, and rain that fell laminate for hours on end . . . townsfolk scurried like half-drowned rats . . . Mutts and curs, clamoring from beneath porch fornixes and back alleys and straining at the end of their runs, whining in the dark.”  

Author James Wade is at his trademark best in his characters’ laser-sharp, regional jargon. These are gritty, swaggering, desperate people who speak in the underbelly of East Texas’ dialect. The language is so finely wrought that all dialogue is telling of character.  

Hollow Out the Dark is steady and seamless in its unfolding. Its short, pithy chapters oscillate from character to character, triggering one critical moment after the next, each one ending in a cliffhanger, painstakingly weaving all characters into alignment through clues and revelations perfectly poised before the reader intuits their need. All the while, the story builds to a blindsiding crescendo.  

This is a book for the discerning reader: captivating, intelligent, panoramically rife with visceral characters whose backstories are given just enough to let us know the central wounds informing their part in the collective story.  

For lovers of crime and adventure, and small town and rural fiction deftly written in a literary voice, author James Wade’s Hollow Out the Dark is a mood defining world of arch enemies engaged in double dealings, and the unwitting people who become collateral damage. A lagniappe is the love triangle that balances the story’s tension, and all in all, it’s an entertaining, page turning, white-knuckle ride.